u/Much_Inspector_9447

Just had my first Shopify app approved yesterday and wanted to write some

of this down while it's fresh, mostly because I read a bunch of these

threads before starting and they either pump you up or doom-post, neither

of which helped that much.

Quick context — I run a small store doing TikTok ads. Spent the last year

on and off fighting with pixel stuff: new pixels stuck in "Inactive" for

days, server-side CAPI docs from TikTok that are kind of vague in all the

wrong places, separate setups for US vs EU pixels because apparently.

Eventually I just sat down and built a tool for myself. Then thought, ok

if I'm hitting this stuff probably others are too, might as well clean it

up and ship as an app.

Actual timeline:

- Day 1-3: build, ~14 focused hours across two sessions

- Day 3: submitted

- Day 7: first rejection, two issues, both my own bugs

- Day 7: fixed and resubmitted (~2 hrs)

- Day 11: rejected again, one issue, also my fault, just missed it the

first round

- Day 11: fix (~1 hr), mark resolved, approved same day

So roughly 17 hours of focused work spread over 10 calendar days, 3 total

rejections across 2 review rounds, and to be clear all of them were my

own code bugs, no surprise gotchas from Shopify themselves.

A few things that bit me that I wish someone had told me earlier:

Bug 1 — `billing.request()` in the Remix template doesn't return anything,

it throws a redirect Response. I wrapped it in try/catch because that's

what you do, and the catch quietly ate the redirect and showed a

"Failed to create subscription" error to the reviewer. Burned a full

review cycle figuring that out.

Bug 2 — `returnUrl` for billing has to be the embedded admin URL

(admin.shopify.com/store/<handle>/apps/<app>/...), not your raw app URL.

Use the raw URL and the user gets approve → kicked out of embedded →

/auth/login. Reviewer caught this on round 2.

Random — Shopify App Store ads still need a credit card on file even

though they hand you a $100 ad credit. Burned ~30 min figuring out why

"Unable to create ad" before I found where to add the card.

The app itself is what the title suggests — auto-warms a fresh pixel from

Inactive to Active without manual test event nonsense, fans events to

multiple pixels via server-side CAPI (hashed in the browser before

egress), and shows a live event log with EMQ scoring so you can actually

see when something quietly breaks. Free tier has real coverage, paid

starts at $9.99.

If anyone here has built tracking/pixel apps before — what's the obvious

thing I'm probably sitting on without realizing? Specifically wondering

about CAPI dedup edges and any webhook ordering stuff that bites later.

Happy to drop the listing in comments if anyone wants to roast it

(sub rules etc).

Well, it only took me a week to pass the review

10 days from zero to approved — sharing what I learned building a TikTok pixel manager

How long does it usually take for Google Ads to start generating traffic?